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The Supreme Court is keeping Trump's promises
The former president is out of office, but his policies have found a lifetime appointment.
The night of the 2016 election, millions stood in front of television screens fearful that Trump’s electoral victory would mean harsher treatment for groups like people of color, immigrants, women, and LGBTQ individuals. He had, after all, promised such policies and delivered on many of them. With President Joe Biden finally in office after a seditious mob overran the Capitol, some believed they could lay down their protest signs and breathe a sigh of relief.
Now, many of the same Americans are haunted not by the preferences of one elected official, but the edicts of six unelected ones. The Supreme Court’s ruling last Friday in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which wiped the right to an abortion from constitutional law, demonstrates that even out of the White House, Trump is still clinging to power. The former president, even as he battles a wide-ranging investigation from the House Jan. 6 Committee, has preserved the ability to shape the law in almost every area, from guns and religion to climate change and tribal sovereignty.
In particular, some civil rights leaders and legal scholars see the momentous ruling as proof of a political process in disrepair and the capture of democratic institutions in service of a privileged few. In this Court, they see not just a continuity only of conservative policy, but of a minoritarian philosophy.
“Until the 1960s, we were fighting on Freedom Rides about the constitutionality of our travel — that is not enumerated in the Constitution,” said Maya Wiley, the president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which maintained a tracker of Trump’s civil rights rollbacks while he was in office. “The logic of Justice Alito’s opinion puts so much on the table.”
For a long time, the Supreme Court had been conceived in popular imagination and civic culture as a protector of minority rights. The legal circles of the twentieth century grappled with the theory of “counter-majoritarian difficulty,” which held that the judiciary was a necessarily antidemocratic institution because in declaring a statute or executive action unconstitutional, they overruled the will of the people as expressed through their representatives, while another camp asserted that the Court could continue to advance democracy if it devoted itself to reinforcing the representation of minorities in political process.
The night of the 2016 election, millions stood in front of television screens fearful that Trump’s electoral victory would mean harsher treatment for groups like people of color, immigrants, women, and LGBTQ individuals. He had, after all, promised such policies and delivered on many of them. With President Joe Biden finally in office after a seditious mob overran the Capitol, some believed they could lay down their protest signs and breathe a sigh of relief.
Now, many of the same Americans are haunted not by the preferences of one elected official, but the edicts of six unelected ones. The Supreme Court’s ruling last Friday in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which wiped the right to an abortion from constitutional law, demonstrates that even out of the White House, Trump is still clinging to power. The former president, even as he battles a wide-ranging investigation from the House Jan. 6 Committee, has preserved the ability to shape the law in almost every area, from guns and religion to climate change and tribal sovereignty.
In particular, some civil rights leaders and legal scholars see the momentous ruling as proof of a political process in disrepair and the capture of democratic institutions in service of a privileged few. In this Court, they see not just a continuity only of conservative policy, but of a minoritarian philosophy.
“Until the 1960s, we were fighting on Freedom Rides about the constitutionality of our travel — that is not enumerated in the Constitution,” said Maya Wiley, the president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which maintained a tracker of Trump’s civil rights rollbacks while he was in office. “The logic of Justice Alito’s opinion puts so much on the table.”
For a long time, the Supreme Court had been conceived in popular imagination and civic culture as a protector of minority rights. The legal circles of the twentieth century grappled with the theory of “counter-majoritarian difficulty,” which held that the judiciary was a necessarily antidemocratic institution because in declaring a statute or executive action unconstitutional, they overruled the will of the people as expressed through their representatives, while another camp asserted that the Court could continue to advance democracy if it devoted itself to reinforcing the representation of minorities in political process.
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